Team members Hilde De Weerdt, Chu Mingkin and Julius Morche contributed to the panel “Historical Knowledge Networks in Global Perspective” at the International Medieval Congress in Leeds (6-9 July 2015). The panel was intended to discuss the relationship between a rise in access to political information and technological advancements in the dissemination of knowledge from the Later Middle Ages onwards, with particular respect to the respective roles of producers and recipients of information in emerging and/or consolidating state structures.

Team members Hilde De Weerdt, Julius Morche and Chu Ming-kin participated in the Away Day of the “state and society network” of the Leiden University Institute for Areas Studies (LIAS) on November 21-22, 2014, to which the group had contributed the panel “Correspondence and networks”. Panellists were invited to present a specific source or source type from their current research and explain their treatment in current scholarship. By discussing and comparing sources and source types from different world historical contexts, the panel had two principal aims: first, to illuminate current challenges in the study of specific historical contexts relating to their respective source base; and, second, to explore the potential of comparative approaches on the basis of identifying commonalities between different types of sources and their historical origin. The panel featured five presentations covering the communication of literati elites in Jin-Yuan China; the communication of mercantile elites in late medieval and Renaissance Venice; the communication between the Sultan and the ruling elite in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire; Republican-era exchanges about labour recruitment between various government agencies and the Japanese management of the Fushun Coalmine (1910-1920s); and the examination essay in eighteenth-century China with specific respect to related social networks and aspects of political resistance.

Team members Hilde De Weerdt, Julius Morche and Chu Ming-kin participated in the “International Medieval Congress” at Leeds University, July 7-10, 2014. Ming-kin organized the panel “Communication in the Mongol Empire” which addressed questions relating to indigenous elites and their Mongol overlords across Eurasia in a comparative perspective. In his paper “Indigenous Elite Networks and Mongol Governance in 13th-century North China”, Ming-kin reconstructed the epistolary network of Han literati in the Jin-Yuan transition and showed how part of the literati network was transformed into an indigenous network of political elites after 1260, which in turn contributed to Mongol governance and administration in north China. Speaking on the same panel, Florence Hodous (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) showed how Persian elites and qadis in the Ilkhanate negotiated their simultaneous allegiance to Islamic law and Mongol rule.

Team members Hilde De Weerdt and Julius Morche served as session chairs at the conference “Connecting the Silk Road: Trade, People & Social Networks (400-1300 AD)”, which was held at Leiden University and Hermitage Amsterdam on May 17 and 18. The presented papers covered a wide range of periods, regions, objects and disciplinary specializations and highlighted the complexity and dynamics of interactions of social groups, objects and architectural structures through and between the networks created along the Silk Road. Linking China and Europe through different land routes across Eurasia, the Silk Road offers an opportunity to historians with a regional focus to frame their research questions in a global perspective.

Team members Hilde De Weerdt, Julius Morche and Ming-kin Chu participated in the “Networks and Interactions” graduate conference at Leiden University (May 9-11, 2014). Hilde served as a discussant for the panel “Social and Economic Networks in Texts”, in which both Julius and Ming-kin as well as Silke Vanbeselaere (KU Leuven) presented papers. In his paper “An Economic Model of Political Communication: Informational Networks in Venetian Long-Distance Trade, 1350-1500”, Julius showed how economic network theory can be used to evaluate both the commercial links between Venetian patricians and the transmissions of political information enabled through these interconnections, and argued that the extent to which commercial and communication networks were mutually embedded necessitated a new model to capture the dynamics of the transmission of political information in early modern long-distance trade. Ming-kin offered a case study of the relationship between early Southern Song literati and the chief councilor Qin Gui through an analysis of Zheng Gangzhong’s epistolary writings in his presentation “Epistolary network in Middle Period China: the Case of Zheng Gangzhong 鄭剛中 (1088-1154)”. He showed how Zheng Gangzhong attempted to build a good rapport with the people surrounding the councilor Qin Gui in order to maintain the former’s position in Sichuan, discussing in particular the relationship between Zheng’s epistolary network and Qin’s long tenure as chief councilor. In her discussion, Hilde highlighted the panel contribution’s distinct conceptual use of “networks”, namely as a particular kind of interpersonal relationship, a philological tool, and a theory of relationships, flows and interactions.